At last, complete success!

So when I first started making ice cream this summer I couldn't quite get the texture right. The ice cream tasted great, but wasn't nearly as smooth as I would have liked. As it turns out, the major problem was that I was being impatient and wasn't leaving the custard in the fridge to chill long enough. So in the past few weeks I've made some highly delicious mint chocolate chip ice cream (although I still can't get the chips quite how I'd like them). 

This weekend though, Wendy asked me to make chocolate ice cream again and since she's leaving in just over a week for vet school I figured I'd better oblige in a hurry. So I bought this Icelandic Nói Síríus chocolate at Whole Foods and set out to try it out. I'd never had the chocolate before but I liked their packaging (two chocolate bars wrapped in wax paper, with a simple width of white paper wrapped around everything) and it was a good amount, so I figured why not. Then when I got home and actually tasted a piece of the chocolate I was dismayed to realize it was, well, not fabulous. Fortunately, once it was melted and blended into the custard the flavor was improved as was the texture.

I cooked the custard a bit longer than usual this time around--just a minute or so but it thickened up better. By the end of its time in the fridge it had thickened enough that I couldn't just pour it out but instead needed to use a spatula. That's probably the thickness it was always supposed to have, but I hadn't been getting it there before. 

The final result, once frozen, was a dense, wonderfully smooth ice cream and while it could have a bit more depth of flavor to it to be truly perfect, it's still pretty damn excellent. 

Cinnamon Ice Cream

I've been craving cinnamon ice cream ever since eating it (with an excellent apple crisp) at a restaurant a few weeks ago. I've also been wanting to try making a Philadelphia-style (aka egg-free) ice cream. I had a bit of trouble finding a recipe for one, but finally dug one up in A Passion for Ice Cream by using the look-inside feature on Amazon. I'm considering buying the book as I think it's focus on Philadelphia-style ice creams would make a nice counterpoint to the Williams-Sonoma book which pretty much focuses on custard-based ice creams. Also appealing is the fact that it has lots of desserts which use ice cream as part of the dessert instead of the whole thing.

Anyway, the recipe is super simple. I was about 1/4 cup short on cream so I just added an extra 1/4 cup whole milk and otherwise followed the directions as well as I could (it was a little hard to read the numbers on the Amazon reader. I threw 2-1/2 cups heavy cream, 1-1/4 cups of milk, 2/3 cup sugar, 2 cinnamon sticks , 1/3 tsp ground cinnamon, and 1/3 tsp salt in a pot and scalded the whole mess. Then I chilled everything, strained it into the ice cream maker, and froze. Easy peasy.

The finished ice cream has a delicacy and milky sweetness, paired with the distinct, but not overwhelming, flavor of the cinnamon. When I was little, whenever I was sick my mother would make buttered toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. This tastes pretty much like that in ice cream form. I think it might be a bit too cream flavored for me, but I mostly like it, and Wendy has pronounced herself a fan.

It came out smoother than my past attempts at ice cream making but I'm not sure if it's because I didn't have to make custard or if it's because I chilled everything for longer than previously before pouring it into the ice cream maker. Too many variables.